What is Siri?

By
Jill DuffyOct. 18, 2011, 12:39 a.m.

When Apple announced a new iPhone 4S earlier this month, the company also properly introduced the world to Siri. Siri is a speech-recognition "personal assistant" that's built into all Apple iPhone 4S smartphones. The software isn't an "app" in the iPhone sense, meaning it's not something you can download from the App Store (although it used to be; see A Brief History of Siri below). It doesn't have an icon that you press from the phone's screen to launch it.

Siri is a speech-recognition computer application. It has both speech input and output, meaning you can speak to it, and it can speak back to you.

You speak to Siri to ask it questions and give it commands, such as small tasks that you'd like it to complete. For example, ask Siri about the weather, and it will respond out loud with a short summary of the day's weather report and on-screen with a snapshot of the five-day forecast. Tell Siri that you need to schedule an appointment for 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, and it will add an item to your calendar, then confirm verbally that it has done so. Say you receive an incoming text message but can't devote your eyes to the screen to read it; you can command Siri to read it aloud to you. Siri does not process your speech input locally on your phone. The software sends commands through a remote server, so you have to be connected to Wi-Fi or a 3G signal.

A Brief History of Siri Siri is not Apple's first venture into voice-activated controls and speech-recognition, although the program makes a few big leaps over the capabilities of VoiceOver, the technology used in Mac computers since OS X 10.4, as well as iPhones since iPhone 3GS. One of the big differences is that VoiceOver was touted as an accessibility feature, meaning it was mostly used by the visually impaired and people who can't easily operate iPhones (Parkinson's disease patients, for example), while Siri is meant for the mass market.

Apple did not develop this technology in house. Rather, Apple acquired Siri Inc. in 2010, a company that had developed an iPhone app called Siri Personal Assistant. Sometime after Apple took over the company, the app was pulled from the App Store.

Languages, Accents, and Dialects The software is technically in beta, so while it's functional, it does have some limitations. The biggest limitation right now is language support. Currently, you can only use Siri to its full potential when you use American English and you're physically in the United States. Siri does have options for U.K. English, Australian English, French (France), and German, but if you use the program in any of those language, you can't search for businesses or locations on a map.

One of the striking features of Siri is that it will improve the more people use it. Siri will be collecting data from users, like their regional accents and dialects and common phrases that people use, and analyzing that information to improve. Additionally, the more you specifically use it, the better it understands your particular accent and characteristics of your speech.

Supported Apps Siri does not support most third-party apps at this point in its development. It currently only works with:

Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for computer scientists and students. She also spent five years as a writer and managing editor of Game Developer magazine, ... See Full Bio